GodsBeingIsinComing:

EberhardJngelsDoctrineoftheTrinity

David W. Congdon

1. Introduction

In this essay I seek to provide a brief introduction to Eberhard Jngels constructive proposal regarding

the doctrine of the Trinity. Jngels doctrine of the Trinity is perhaps the least understood part of his

dogmatic work, and for those who do understand it, the most controversial. Jngel understands Gods

triune being as a being-in-coming. This position must not be confused with his analysis of Barths

position as Gods being-in-becoming. While Jngel certainly stands in Barths shadow, his own theology

is a radicalization of Barths theology in a way that retains the single triune subject while emphasizing

the historical and missional nature of Gods eternal becoming. While a fuller treatment of Jngels

trinitarian theology has yet to be written, what follows is an inchoate outline of his position. I begin by

looking at his understanding of the immanent and economic Trinity, after which I will examine his

trinitarian theology of Gods being-in-coming.

2. Jngel on the Economic and Immanent Trinity

In his 1975 essay on the economic and immanent Trinity,1 Jngel comments (favorably) on the famous

thesis by Karl Rahner: The economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity and vice versa. While the essay is

ostensibly a collection of nascent reflections on Rahners theology of the Trinity, in these few pages

1
Eberhard Jngel, Das Verhltnis von konomischer und immanenter Trinitt, Zeitschrift fr Theologie und Kirche 72 (1975):
353-64; ET The relationship between economic and immanent Trinity, Theology Digest 24 (1976): 179-84.

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Jngel elucidates some of his most profound insights, ones that would find much fuller articulation in

God as the Mystery of the World, published two years later in 1977.2 Jngel opens the essay with a remarkable

summary of his entire doctrine of God:

The doctrine of the Trinity expresses the truth that God is alive. That God is alive means that he

lives of himself in himself. God lives means that God is life. That God lives is for Christian

faith a certainty which extends to the man Jesus, so that we profess, Truly this man was the Son

of God (Mk 15:39). The truth, God lives, has to hold even at the death of the man Jesus as

Gods own Son. This implies that the being of God is a unity of life and death, for the benefit of

life. John clarifies this unity of life and death for the benefit of life (revealed in the resurrection of

Jesus Christ as a communicable event) when he identifies God with love: God is love (1 Jn 4:8).

That God lives as love is the mystery of his being, revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of

Jesus Christ.3

While this one paragraph is Jngels doctrine of God in nuce, a few elements are worth pointing for the

purpose of illuminating his understanding of the relation between the economic Trinity and immanent

Trinity. First, Jngel states up front that the doctrine of the Trinity is an elaboration of the more basic

truth that the God worshiped by the Christian church is the living God revealed in the life, death, and

resurrection of Jesus Christ. That God lives, for Jngel, means that God has life in Godself. Second,

following Barths move in 28.2 of Church Dogmatics II/1, Jngel defines the truth, God lives, with the

Johannine affirmation, God loves or God is love. Again, and throughout his theology, Jngel grounds

the doctrine of the Trinity in the self-revelation of God in Jesus Christ, especially in the death and

resurrection of Jesus as the unity of life and death for the sake of life. I will return to this axiom later.

2
Eberhard Jngel, Gott als Geheimnis der Welt (Tbingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1977); ET God as the Mystery of the World, trans. Darrell
L. Guder (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1983). Hereafter cited as GGW and GMW, respectively.
3
Jngel, Relationship, 179.

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The point here is that already we see the outline for how he will explicate the relationship between

economic and immanent Trinity.

Commenting on Rahners thesis, Jngel says that it enables us to establish the trinitarian concept of God

through a theology of the Crucified, and thus responds to the exegetical problem better than was

possible in classical teaching about the Trinity.4 Jngel states that classical doctrines of the Trinity

were prevented from grounding their teaching on the crucifixion of Christ because of the principle of

immutability and the Augustinian rule against tritheism (opera trinitatis ad extra sunt indivisa). Together

these ancient axioms resulted in a split between theology and economy, in which the former was

marked by immutability and the latter by temporal and spatial change, the former by eternally

differentiated divine persons and the latter by unified divine action in the person of Jesus. Jngel

responds to this tradition by arguing that we need to let a different classical axiom guide us: The Trinity

is a mystery of salvation.5 According to Jngel, this axiom provides a grounding of the Trinity in the

event of our salvation in Jesus Christ. Trinitarian dogma, on this basis, can develop out of christological

dogma without being hampered by metaphysical presuppositions regarding immutability and

impassibility. Jngel thus proposes that we radically rethink the Trinity out of a center in the death and

resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Jngel argues that the unity of the immanent and economic Trinity is found in the identity of God as love:

God has shown himself as love . . . in the unique event of the surrender of Jesus Christ to death.6

Because Jesus reveals the very being of God, Jngel goes on to say that God is love both in his self-

relationship . . . and in his relationship to the other who is distinct from him.7 To put it simply, God is

what God does in Jesus Christ. Consequently, the eternal Word of God from the beginning . . . is to

4
Ibid., 180.
5
Ibid., 181.
6
Ibid., 182.
7
Ibid.

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become incarnate.8 The eternal Logos is the Logos incarnandus, not simply an abstract Logos asarkos. What

occurs in the economy, he says, must be intended immanently. The eternal Son thus has a hypostatic

function; that is, the Son eternally has the capacity to become flesh. None of this means that Jngel

collapses the immanent and economic Trinity. He explicitly rejects a doctrine of the Trinity which

would make an immanent-economic distinction tautological.9 Jngel retains the primacy of the

immanent Trinity over against the economic in order to preserve the freedom and unmerited grace of

Gods self-bestowal, but he grounds the nature of this divine self-donation in the life, death, and

resurrection of Jesus Christ.10

To conclude this section, I quote Jngel from God as the Mystery of the World:

The immanent trinitarian doctrine understands God himself with no regard for his relationship

to man; the economic trinitarian doctrine, by contrast, understands Gods being in its

relationship to man and his world. This distinction . . . is legitimate only when the economic

doctrine of the Trinity deals with Gods history with man, and the immanent doctrine of the

Trinity is its summarizing concept.

Jngel radically defines the being of God in light of what God has done in Jesus Christ. Jngel

historicizes the being of God, and lets the economic Trinity provide the definition for who God is in and

for Godself. We turn now to his constructive doctrine of the triune being of God as a being-in-coming.

3. Gods Being Is in Coming

8
Ibid.
9
Ibid., 184.
10
Ibid.

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Jngel summarizes Barths doctrine of the Trinity with the thesis: Gottes Sein ist im WerdenGods being

is in becoming. Jngel summarizes his own doctrine of the Trinity with the alternative axiom: Gottes Sein

ist im KommenGods being is in coming.11 Barth grounds his doctrine of the Trinity in the coming of

God to the world, actualized in the coming of Jesus Christ. With this thesis, Jngel sets forth a missional

ontology of the triune God: the Father is defined as God coming from God; the Son is God coming to

God; and the Spirit is God coming as God. According to Jngel, by defining the Trinity in this way, we

establish the unity of the economic and immanent Trinity without sacrificing the necessary distinction

between the two. That is, by coming to the world in the economy of grace, Jngel says that we must

understand God as being intrinsically the one who is coming, and not only because of the existence of

the world.12

Jngel begins his analysis of Gods being-in-coming in God as the Mystery of the World with an opening

thesis:

The statement Gods being is in coming implies first of all that Gods being is the event of his coming

to himself (das Ereignis seines Zu-sich-selbst-Kommens). This event, this coming of Gods being to

itself, is what the tradition has meant when it spoke of eternity. But eternity is not something

distinct from God. God himself is eternity. God is eternally coming to himself.13

With this statement, we see that Jngel is going to ground the doctrine of the divine attributes in the

eternal coming of God. This is in accordance with his doctrine of analogy, in which he replaces the old

debate between the analogy of being and the analogy of faith with his own analogy of advent (Analogie

11
Jngel, Das Verhltnis, 363; Relationship, 184.
12
GMW, 380.
13
Ibid.; GGW, 521.

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des Advent).14 We can only speak of God on the basis of Gods coming to us in Jesus Christ. Furthermore,

by identifying Gods coming with Gods eternity, Jngel seeks to safeguard the freedom of God. Just as

eternity is something that belongs properly to God alone, so too Gods coming is something that is

internal to Gods being. Gods coming, like Gods eternity, is grounded in Godself: God always derives

or comes from God. He is his own absolute origin.15 This is why Jngel then goes on to explicate Gods

being as coming from, coming to, and coming as God. The coming of God is definitive for who God is as

Father, Son, and Holy Spirit from all eternity. I turn now to an exposition of each element in Jngels

trinitarian theology.

3.1. Father: God comes from God (Gott kommt von Gott)

God comes from God in the sense that God is his own origin (Gott ist sich selber Ursprung).16 God is not

derived from anything other than God. And that means the concept of being is subordinate to the

concept of God. Neither being nor nothingnessboth of which go togetherhave any constitutive role

in the originality of God. God is the absolute origin primarily of Godself, and then secondarily, of both

being and nothingness. Jngel is concerned here to avoid the classical error of beginning with the

Beyondness of Gods Being (Seinsjenseitigkeit Gottes).17 That is, by presupposing a general concept of

being, the tradition then made Gods being ineffably transcendent in order to protect Gods otherness.

But in doing so, the tradition made God unspeakable and unthinkable. Jngels entire project is an

attempt to rethink the being of God along the lines of Gods advent, i.e., Gods self-communication. As a

result, the absolute originality of God is not a static ineffable otherness but the ground of Gods eternal

coming from God to humanity in Jesus Christ. God is speakable because Gods being is not locked up in

Godself but is always rather in actu. Gods being is thinkable because Gods being is in coming.

14
GMW, 286f; GGW, 389f.
15
GMW, 380.
16
Ibid., 381; GGW, 522.
17
Ibid.

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When we speak of Gods absolute originality, therefore, we are speaking of what the tradition calls the

fatherhood of God. To affirm that God is the Father is to acknowledge God as the Origin. God the

Father is the origin of Gods own being-in-coming as well as the origin of all other created being. God

comes to us out of an origin in the Father, who is the Father of all that exists. God the Father is therefore

also God the Creator. God the Father and Creator is the Lord over all that exists. For this reason, God

the Father is also the one who is Lord over new existence, which is why Jngel ascribes the act of Gods

justification of the ungodly to the Father.

Two things follow from the absolute originality of God the Father. First, as the origin of being, the

Father distinguishes Gods being from all that exists. The eternal Father, according to Jngel, is distinct

from everything which is as is his Yes from what he affirms.18 There is a qualitatively infinite and yet

positive distinction between what exists and the one who brought all things into existence. Because of

this qualitative yet speakable distinction, Jngel defines God as earlier than being and nonbeing, and

thus God is the eternal Father in himself apart from the existence of anything external to God.19

Second, as the one who is distinct from all being, God the Father is also the one who welcomes others by

grace to participate in being. God is a social essence (geselliges Wesen) who brings others into fellowship

with Godself. Because the being of God is in coming, God comes to the one who is other than God, the

one who is lost and unloved, and calls them into relationship with Godself. In distinguishing Godself

from others, the Father also graciously comes to others in the being of the Son.

3.2. Son: God comes to God (Gott kommt zu Gott)

18
Ibid.; GGW, 523.
19
Ibid.; GGW, 522-23.

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If God is the origin, God is also the goal. God comes from God in order then to come to God. These are two

distinct modes of existence of the one eternal being of God. God comes from the Father in order to come

to the Son. These two modes of being are also equally original. The key terms in this section of Jngels

doctrine of the Trinity are Ziel and zielen, meaning goal and to aim. God the Son is the goal of God

the Father, and God the Father aims at God the Son.

The central thesis in this section, the one which conditions Jngels entire theology, is: God aims in

himself at what is other. . . . God aims in his eternal begetting toward creation.20 In other words, God

the Son is always from eternity oriented toward the human Jesus. The Logos is always the Logos

incarnandusthe Logos to become incarnateand not the Logos asarkos. Jngel thus says:

In the eternal Son of God, who himself was not created, but comes eternally from God the Father,

in this Son of God coming eternally from God God aims at the man who temporally comes from

God. . . . In this creative being of God of Son as the aim of God the Father, God is aiming at man.

In that God the Father loves the Son, in the event of this divine self-love, God is aiming selflessly

at his creation.21

Jngel is quick to add that we must distinguish very sharply between the eternal derivation of God from

God (Son as the goal of the Father) and the temporal derivation of man from God (humanity as the

goal of the Father). The latter is by no means something necessary to Gods own being, but it is an act of

grace. The being-in-coming of God is not dependent upon the creation as the basis for the coming of God

to God: God by no means first becomes his goal when he aims toward man. He is adequate to himself.22

Jngel thus describes Gods being as overflowing being (berstrmendes Sein), which is an expression that

20
Ibid., 384.
21
Ibid.
22
Ibid.

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Barth uses himself in CD II/1 in describing Gods being-in-act. God overflows to others out of the

plenitude of Gods own eternal being-in-coming.

The final and most important dimension of Gods coming as the Son is that God comes to death. God is

both the origin of life and the goal of life, both the alpha and the omega. By aiming at humanity in the

Son, God aims at the death of Jesus Christ. Gods self-love is the event which was consummated in the

selflessness of the death of the eternal Son of God.23 Gods self-love aims at the selflessness of the cross,

which is the event of the unity of life and death for the sake of life. God does not give up himself in this

death, because Gods eternal being aims at and thus includes the possibility of death in itself. The Father

is most truly the Father in giving up the Son to death, and the Son is most truly the Son in his surrender

to death. By affirming Godself in the event of the cross, God awakens Jesus from the dead: Gods self-

affirmation is thus forever identical with his Yes to the world, which was actualized in Jesus

resurrection as the justification of the ungodly.

Gods self-affirmation is then the basis for Gods affirmation of humanity as the covenant partner of God.

God brings humanity into correspondence with God through the event of the Sons descent into death:

An analogy results in which the relation of God the eternal Father to God the Son finds its

correspondence in the relation of God the heavenly Father to us humans as his earthly children.24 Here

we have an example of what Barth called the analogy of relation (analogia relationis), which is an analogy

of grace alone, and not by nature. As a result of this analogous relationship between God and humanity,

human persons are capable of knowing and speaking about God. In other words, the death and

resurrection of the Son of God which establishes the correspondence between God and humanity is the

23
Ibid., 385.
24
Ibid., 386.

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basis for all God-talk. This relation is the relation of faitha relation in which God addresses us and we

can addressand this happens in the power of the Spirit.25

3.3. Spirit: God comes as God (Gott kommt als Gott)

The Father is the origin of Gods mission into the far country in Jesus Christ. The Son is the goal of Gods

mission as the one who identifies himself with the dead Jesus for the sake of new life. The Spirit is the

bond of love (vinculum caritatis) who binds Father and Son in an orientation toward a new future.

Temporally speaking, the Father is the past origin, the Son is the present death, and the Spirit is the

future life:

As the bond of love, the Holy Spirit is simultaneously the vehicle of eternity (vehiculum

aeternitatis). As the Spirit of love, God is from eternity to eternity, from age to age. As Spirit, God

is eternally not only the one who is and who was, but also who is to come.26

God comes from God (the Father) to God (the Son) as God (the Spirit). By coming as God, the Spirit is

the ground of mutual self-affirmation between Father and Son. As the bond of love, the Spirit ensures

that Gods identification with the dead Jesus is self-affirmation and not self-alienation. The Spirit

ensures that the goal of the Son does not become an end point, but is instead the continuation of Gods

being-in-coming. In the Spirit, God proceeds and advances toward the open future. In the Spirit, we are

able to believe in God as the one who came in Jesus Christ and who is always coming anew to us in the

word of the gospel. The Spirit is thus the future of God and our own future, though the future opened

25
Ibid., 387.
26
Ibid., 388.

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up by the Holy Spirit is not empty but instead concretely and sharply contoured by the person of Jesus

Christ.27

Jngels trinitarian doctrine of God seeks to explicate the being of God as the one who is love. God

comes from God, to God, and as God solely because this God is a God of love, who goes into the far

country in order to justify the ungodly and address us as Gods covenant partners. The future of God and

our own future is thus a future of love: God and man will have love as their mutual future. Faith in the

Holy Spirit takes us along into this future by leading us now along the way of love.28 By virtue of Jesus

death and the affirmation of the Father in the power of the Spirit, we are made participants in the triune

love of God. Gods being-in-coming is thus the dynamic unity of divine life and human death for the sake

of new life together in covenant fellowship for all eternity.

4. Conclusion

Eberhard Jngels trinitarian doctrine of God is a radical attempt to rethink the being of God in the light

of Gods advent in Jesus. If Jesus is in fact the coming of God to humanity, then we are forced to

understand the eternal being of God as one who comes from God to God. Jngel is here simply following

Barths theological method: the immanent Trinity must correspond to Gods economic self-revelation in

Jesus Christ. What Jngel adds is a stronger emphasis on the historical and missional nature of Gods

being, so that Gods being embraces human history and Gods coming is grounded in the mission of the

Son into the far country.

Why begin with Gods advent? Jngel does not answer this question directly but it seems clear that he

wants a doctrine of the Trinity which will not only fund a historical-missional movement into the far

country in Jesus Christ but alsoand perhaps more importantlyprovide the ground of possibility for
27
Ibid., 389.
28
Ibid.

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Gods coming to human individuals in the kerygmatic word of the cross. Jngels theological ontology is

thus a dialogical ontology: Gods addresses humanity in the Word made flesh and continues to address us

in the word of the gospel. Gods address is grounded in Gods coming to us, which is itself grounded in

Gods coming to Godself.

This brief essay has been an attempt to explore the logic of Jngels doctrine of the Trinity. A future

analysis could show how Jngel (1) enables Gods being to enter death without rupturing the divine life

(Moltmann), (2) establishes a robust sociality within God without resorting to proto-tritheistic social

trinitarianism (Moltmann again, Pannenberg, et al.), and (3) actualizes the being of God without simply

collapsing the immanent into the economic Trinity or turning God into the process God of radical

Hegelianism. Unfortunately, all this will have to wait for a future essay.

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